He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
---Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

I Gotta Go Outside?

More running around today on miscellaneous errands. One involves our main PC. With increasing frequency, the audio will just stop working. Control panel says the HDMI cable is not connected and the sound is going to the default port (that has nothing connected to it). Which is really weird given that the same cable carries both audio and video and the video works fine. The first couple times this happened, a complete power down and reboot fixed it. The last time, the problem was more persistent, but updating the drivers cured the problem. Then yesterday, it struck again. Only this time, nothing was bringing it back. A quick trip around Google just confirmed that there is something seriously wrong somewhere between Win7, the ATI drivers and the ATI Radeon card. Everyone was just guessing and making random changes to their systems which sometimes worked, but mostly didn't. I was already in need of a complete reinstall due to a power failure in New Hampshire that had borked the partition table, so why not? I started the install, which got to a certain point and just seemed to stop with nothing displayed. Duh. The HDMI port ain't gonna work during an install; I needed to drop back to VGA. No sweat. I go rummaging through my cable box: couple thousand feed of Cat5, big roll of coax, various phone cables, a couple XLR audio cables (?!?!?), USB, Firewire, eSATA, spare back plates, every kind of cable converter and/or splitter imaginable. No VGA.

Crap.

So my main system is setting here semi-dead after putting itself into sleep mode when it got bored waiting for me to respond to whatever prompt is on the screen. I'm sure buying a VGA cable at Best Buy is going to cost me about what a new PC would run instead of the $4 Amazon would charge, but we need access to the files on the Drobo, which is connected to the main system. Grrrrr.

So I have to leave the apartment. While I'm out, I also need to make a bank run and a pharmacy run, so it's not just for a VGA cable. But still. Keeping the car means I have to go out not just once, but twice. Unless Debbie wants to walk home from work. Which I'm pretty sure she doesn't. But I really hate leaving my little cave.

Yesterday, I was nosing around checking on the job situation around here. I found a central Florida on-line job listing service with a couple promising leads. But the interesting part was the little stat box up in the corner of the screen that ran through a series of employment statistics: Unemployment - 11.7%. Available jobs - 1,107. Available candidates - 108,853. Hmmmm. Is this supposed to be encouraging? Anyway, I may put on something more professional that shorts, sandals and a t-shirt and stop in on a certain tax prep chain of my acquaintance and see what I can maybe shake loose.

In weather-related news, the current tracks on both hurricanes have them missing us by a wide margin. There isn't anything else really forming up behind them, so we may survive our first hurricane season without so much as a downpour. That can always change, of course, but as of right now, it looks to be another quiet hurricane season contrary to the increasingly-wrong predictions made by the Global Warming Jihad.